Tuesday, March 25, 2014

in
which we see a teacher discuss the only thing more private than his sex life

The Secret Life of Teaching, #9

By Horace Dewey

I stare at the calculator: $281.92. That’s
what I have to work with in terms of a monthly car payment. My wife, a soccer
mom who totes three kids (a fourth is in college) and a couple dogs all over
metropolitan New York about 2,000 miles a month, drives too much to lease one.
We’ll have to buy—hopefully new, maybe used. But 281.92 a month for five years
will only get us about halfway there.She and I have been doing extra work—summer classes, SAT II prep, etc.
to make up the difference (and pay for a looming set of braces on our
youngest).

I find all this exhausting, even
depressing, to contemplate. I shouldn’t.My salary has gone up substantially over the course of the last decade,
thanks a series of good contracts and my recent promotion to department chair.
I now make more than double what I did when I started at the school a dozen
years earlier, and recently broke through the sixth figure in my salary,
putting me at the top of the profession. I am—by most measures of most
jobs—well paid. Alas, I seem to have found ways to deploy my assets as soon as
they’ve appeared. A big chunk of my take-home pay, roughly $6500/month, or
$78,000 annually, goes to cover the schooling expenses of my children; even
with a substantial staff discount, tuition for the two currently in the school
takes up about 40%, or $32,000, of it. The rest of it goes to pay our $2300
monthly mortgage payment and about $1500 a month in property taxes, which I
gladly pay since I have a learning-disabled child in a good public school
system. That leaves the salary of my wife, an associate professor at a nearby
liberal arts college who makes a little less, to cover everything else, with
the significant exception of my eldest child’s college tuition, covered thanks
to the generosity and foresight of my in-laws. We spend too much on takeout,
and too little on things like home maintenance (our house steadily becomes more
shabby—cracks in the driveway, fingerprints on the walls, a running battle
against mildew in our bathrooms). And we don’t give enough to charity. A new
minivan has already been deferred a couple times, and waiting much longer is
asking for a harrowing breakdown on the highway with kids and or dogs in the
old one.

I tell you these fairly quotidian details
about my financial situation in part because it’s the kind of thing my peers
just don’t talk about—I sometimes think people in my demographic are much more
willing talk about the tenor of their orgasms than the tenor of the their
finances—but also quite curious about. I also believe my circumstances—and,
more importantly, my attitudes—are typical of an educator of my generation and
point in the life cycle. (The proportion of my income that goes to my
children’s schooling, for example, is an amount most people in other lines of
work would consider absurd. I reckon we all have our indulgences, mine typical
of my profession.) Like a great many Americans, I consider myself middle class,
whether or not the facts—in my case, a gross family income of about $200,000 in
lower Westchester County—warrant such a designation. I do think, with the
support of some expert opinion I find in the business section of the New York Times and other publications
that I regularly graze, that supporting such a lifestyle is relatively more
expensive than it used to be. I live better than my parents, a housewife and a
New York City firefighter, did. But the rate of improvement has been slowed by
the rate of inflation for things like housing and education. And having four
kids? Financially speaking, that’s just plain dumb.

Whatever the pay scale, few jobs seem
more thoroughly middle class than teaching. No one ever gets rich as a teacher.
Still, while it’s relatively low on the professional ladder, teaching is a bona
fide career in a society where the middle is being whittled out of existence.
Teachers are still generally on the right side of a jagged economic divide in that
we receive salaries (not hourly wages), health care benefits, and paid
vacation. Teaching has been an actual profession for a little over a century
now, a development spurred by a series of convergent phenomena: a Progressive
movement that spurred professionalization in many occupations; the emergence of
education schools offering graduate degrees; and an influx of men taking what
has often been considered “women’s work.”

Teaching has never had the prestige
associated with law or medicine (though that of both has deteriorated in recent
years), or the excitement associated with journalism (less professionally
structured and not especially remunerative for most of its history, but
alluring for its access to power and/or the spotlight). Nor does primary- or
secondary school teaching enjoy the sense of stature associated with college or
university instruction, which has generally placed much more emphasis on
producing original scholarship than actively fostering the art of pedagogy. In
terms of social cachet, primary and secondary education has a relationship with
the professoriate that can be compared with that of medicine and nursing: as
nurses are to doctors, teachers are to professors. The former are generalists
who take care of what are perceived as the less complicated cases, often
knowing and doing more than they get credit for, while the latter enjoy greater
stature rooted in their analytic skills. (Again there are gender echoes here,
as teaching and nursing have long been regarded as feminine “helping”
professions).

I speak as a failed academic. I went to
graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I got a Ph.D. in
American Studies. I held on for almost a decade in adjunct positions—a couple
very attractive ones, but all of them dead ends. I might have held on longer
had not the arrival of children (among them unexpected set of twins and even
more medically surprising daughter) rendered the long-distance commute I’d been
doing untenable. It was time to grow up and think seriously about making money.
Lacking the credentials to teach in public school, I was lucky to land a
position at my current post, believing from the start that it would likely be
the first and last real job I’d ever be offered. White, male, old, and
overpriced in a market that prizes youth and diversity, I’m probably now
unemployable were I try to teach anywhere else.

My gaze shifts back to the $281.92 on my
calculator. Multiplied by 12, that’s $3383.04 a year; over the course of a
five-year loan it adds of up to $16,902.20. What about interest? How much would
depend on the rate. I’m getting close to the edge of my numeric competency in
any case. I figure I’ll need about $15,000 as a down payment. Damn. For thirty
grand I could probably get a pretty nice sports car. Not this time.

I remember joke a cousin of mine once cracked: “When a pretty
girl smiles at you when you pull up at a traffic light while driving a minivan,
that’s all you, man.” I’m not in the
market for pretty girls anymore. I’m just trying to get the job done—or, I
should say, to do one job well enough and long enough to get another one—that
of family man—done. Then, surely, I’ll be on easy street ….

Monday, March 17, 2014

Mid-morning, mid-March. Outside, it’s
frigid. Inside, the radiator heat makes me woozy. A few history teachers have
gathered here in my classroom, at the behest of Hannah, our department principal,
for training on the Smart Boards we’ve all received as part of the school’s latest
technology upgrade. One more round of being nudged to learn things we never
want know and will be incompetent with when we try. I’ve made my peace with
Smart Boards as a matter of using them as glorified projectors. But now we’re
being nudged to use them for classroom note-taking and other tasks. So it is
that the rising waters of technological innovation still manage to reach us. Now
we get to be the confused, bored, and resentful students.

Our technology maven, Jessica, an
impressively competent outside consultant who’s clearly younger than her
salt-and-pepper mane would suggest, is chatting away about all the tools and
applications that are now at our disposal with the new software that can be
easily downloaded at . . . I didn’t quite hear and don’t want to ask. My
colleague Tony Snowden, who’s always been an early-adopter—he had an iPhone on day
one—is querying her closely on how to access the feature she had been showing
us before she moved on to whatever it is that she’s now doing. “You just go and
adjust the settings on the system preferences menu,” she says, and Tony nods
with satisfaction. “Just be sure you have it on the default settings option,”
she adds.

“Of course,” Tony says in a tone of
good-natured ribbing, “your default setting is permanently set to off, Ed.”

Absolutely,” he replies, happy to be the
butt of a joke.

Our maven renders a thin smile. I have a
fleeting sense of sympathy for her: it must be tedious to talk to idiots all
day. I glance up at the clock. I’m missing a workout on the Stairmaster; the
gym is usually empty this period.

Actually, there had been a point when I
was looking forward to this session. At last year’s professional day, I had
watched in amazement as one of my colleagues in the science department wrote
with a virtual marker on a whiteboard and then instantly turned the words into
type. Given the complaints and queries I constantly get whenever I write on the
blackboard, this was something I was truly interested in learning about.
Despite a twinge of unease to see those slate boards go—I was surprised when
picking up my daughter from a recent playdate to see that her host had a huge
blackboard in his kitchen, surely a sign that what was once a commonplace
object was well on its way to becoming an antique—I was ready to finish stepping
into the 21st century. Though of course many of the skills I was most eager to
learn were ones I could have picked up years ago.

I note that our maven is just now
beginning to demonstrate the latest aspects of the handwriting-to-text feature,
and raise my hand. “Could we use a real-life example?” I ask. She’s reluctant,
I can see from the fleeting expression of irritation that almost imperceptibly
crosses her face. But I leap to the front of the room, grab a green virtual
marker, and start writing some points I plan to use in class that very day.
“You might want to go a little slower,” she says from behind me, having
adjusted to my imposition. I try to write:

SOURCES OF WEALTH IN THE POST-CIVIL WAR
WEST

• Land (farming)

• Mining

• Ranching

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that
my handwriting on the Smart Board is even worse than it is on a blackboard—smears
of green sludge.

“You have to learn to write differently,”
our maven says.

“Is that all?” Ed asks.

She ignores him. “You have to write more
with your shoulder.” She demonstrates the motion. I nod as if I understand and
grab the virtual eraser, dismayed that my sludge doesn’t disappear.

“You have to put the marker down first
before you can erase.”

I do so. Now the eraser works, more or
less. When I put it down, she comes over, takes the red marker and models how I
should actually write. It of course looks perfectly legible.

“Now,” she explains as I take my seat
again, “in order to turn this into type you must first turn it into an object.”
She moves her index finger across her text and a box forms. She moves her
finger to a small square on the upper-right hand corner of the box and a string
of suggested words appears: “Sources of welts/Sources of welfare/Sources of
wealth” and a few more I can’t quite take in. She selects “Sources of wealth”
and voila: handwriting becomes type.

“Now you turned ‘sources of wealth’ into
what you call an object,” I observe. But do you have to make a separate object
for each line of the Smart Board?”

“Probably.”

Now I’m truly discouraged. It all seems
like so much work: making sure you have the right settings; making sure you
don’t pick up the eraser while you still have a marker; making sure you write
the right way; drawing boxes around the objects; hoping you’ll get the right
option for turning it into text: surely it’s simpler just to pick up a piece of
chalk, no?

“I gotta run,” says Tony. This session has
probably been pitched too low for him. He likes to tinker anyway. I look up at
the clock again, and see that if I leave now I can squeeze in that workout
after all. I see Ed is also motioning to go. He’s saying something to the maven
that makes her break into a broad smile: a divide has been bridged. But not a
technological divide: He and I have learned little useful information. We
probably needed a day, not an hour. But a day would just be too much with
everything else we have going on.

That night as I brush my teeth it occurs
to me that some of my students must feel the way I did earlier that day—probably
not about technology, which they seem to take to instinctively, but some of the
academic work they’re asked to do. They find it hard but pretend they don’t or
try to laugh it off. They fake their way for a while, maybe get the hang of
aspects of a subject, and try to keep moving. It’s the improvising that ends up
being the skill that gets developed—the bluffing, faking, and ad-hoc adaptation.

Three days later, a canceled meeting
unexpectedly gives me a half hour, and I walk into my empty classroom. I turn
on the computer and Smart Board, and begin stumbling around. A half-hour later,
I’ve managed to write “Tomorrow’s class will meet in the library” and turn it
into text. A triumph. I have no clear idea how facile I’ll ever be on this
thing; I suspect I’ll settle into some simple routines that I won’t wander from
very much. But I know I have to do this. There’s some part of me that will die
less quickly if I do. Truth be told, I'm a little surprised, and more than a
little pleased, that I'm not quite ready to be erased.

Monday, March 10, 2014

"OK kids, listen up!" Denise Richardson bellows to the crowd of students on
the edge of Walden Pond. "I'm going to go over the assignment one more
time. Youmustfollow the directions ...."

I’m
stunned by how beautiful the pond is on this autumnal morning. The foliage
shimmers on the still water and bursts against the crystalline sky. Dubious
about this part of the overnight field trip—instructing students to go into the
woods and have a Transcendental moment strikes me as a contradiction in terms—I’m
nevertheless delighted to be here. In the afternoon, I’ll be one of a set of
teachers leading classes along the Freedom Trail. I’m looking forward to
indulging with a cannoli at Quincy Market.

I’m
jostled back into attentiveness by an unexpected moment of silence that is apparently
the result of Denise looking at her watch. "You will have fifty
minutes," she tells the students. "That's enough time to walk around
the whole perimeter if you want to, but you'll have to keep a good pace. She
turns and points to her left. "If you simply want to see the site where
Thoreau had his cabin, walk straight this way. It will take you about ten
minutes. Whatever you decide, you have to beback
on the bus at 11 sharp. Hey! Alan!" Denise claps twice and points at a
sleepy student I don’t know (which is most of this batch). "To be awake is
to be alive!" Some chuckles; I wonder if they get the allusion or are
simply amused by the contrast between Denise’s no-nonsense energy and Alan's
torpor. "All right then," she concludes. "Go!"

The
students stand around dumbly for a moment, but begin to disperse with growing momentum.
"I'm going over to the gift shop," Denise tells me. "I have to
make some phone calls. I'll be over in a little while to help round up this
herd of cats." I nod and begin walking around the pond, beginning at the
far side from the cabin site.

I
have ambivalent feelings about Thoreau. I’ve no patience for the cranky misfit
of "Civil Disobedience," who thought he could simply opt out of
paying taxes he didn't like. And no man who has his mother and sister do his
laundry can call himself self-reliant. But for all his prickliness, I sense an
inner struggle to live the words, and know that dismissing him as a phony is a
little like complaining that sinning churchgoers are hypocrites: it's missing
the point. I’m intrigued that Walden Pond is
not—was not—the wilderness, in fact within easywalking distancefrom the village of Concord. I read
that a railroad ran near the actual site of the celebrated cabin in Thoreau’s
time, and apparently still does. Looking ahead I see a cluster of students, and
evidence of a rail bed off to the left. I veer away from it so I can continue
to savor my solitude.

I
haven’t gone far off the main trail when I see two still figures lying side by
side in a bed of pine about 100 feet away. They are not engaged in an overt sex
act, but the sense of intimacy is unmistakable. From the angle of my approach I
can only see sneaker bottoms clearly; the rest is partially hidden in
evergreens. One kid apparently has his hands behind his head; the other appears
nestled beside him. I don't recognize them, but either or both could be my
students. Though I feel obligated to break up this idyll, I’m charmed by it.
Years from now, long after Denise Richardson’s (undone?) assignment is
forgotten,thiswill be what these two remember
from this trip. Surely even a loner like Thoreau would, or should, approve.I
hear a voice shouting off far to her right. "Horace? Is that you?"
It's Denise, motioning a cluster of students to keep moving toward the group's
starting point. "Yes!" I respond forcefully. As I do, the two
students scramble to their feet and begin running away, presumably to circle
behind the cabin site and rejoin the group there. As they do, I see that
they're both boys.

"Will
you backtrack a bit and round up any slackers?" Denise asks."Sure,”
I say, turning around and walking in the opposite direction. While I scrunch my
eyes, trying to determine if I recognize either boy, I’m approached by my
favorite student, Wilhelmina Sperry, notebook in hand, clearly running to make
up lost time and ground."It's
OK, Willie," I say reassuringly. "Is there anybody else back there?""No.
I’m the last one," she says as she slows to a walk and adjusts her glasses,
clearly out of breath. "I wanted to take a few more minutes to make some
notes about a spider web I found. I guess I lost track of time."

"Good
for you." Willie and I are now walking toward the bus at exactly the same
pace."I
love it here," she says. "That was a good assignment. Now that I've
actuallyseenthe pond, I need to re-read the
parts ofWaldenwe discussed in class."

"Sounds
like a good idea."A
pause. And then: "Mr. Dewey, would you call Thoreau a Romantic
writer?""Well,
not exactly. Not in what I think of in the classic sense of the term, like
Wordsworth or Emerson. But I'm sure a lot of people would.""I
just love him."

"Fair
enough. But remember, Willie: it's a big world out there. There are lots of
fish in the pond."

Willie
turns her head at me, smiling. "You're not talking about how they restock
the pond with fish.""No,
Willie, I am not."Willie’s
smile breaks into a chuckle. "OK, Mr. Dewey. I'll keep my standards up.”

"Thatta
girl, Willie. Any writer would be lucky to catch you. Any non-writer,
too."

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Ginger
has come to see me to talk about her latest essay. This is a meeting neither
one of us particularly wants to have—she’s surely dreads it; I’m knee-deep in
the middle of recalibrating my spring semester syllabus when she arrives. But
now that our unplanned encounter, largely orchestrated by others, is happening,
we’re both doing our best to make it worthwhile.

I’ve
known for weeks now that Ginger is a weak student. Utterly silent in class, she
never handed in her first essay of the new semester, and when I asked her about
it a couple days after it was due, she said that she had a bad Internet
connection. That’s fine, I said. Just give me a hard copy tomorrow. When that
didn’t happen, she said she was having printer problems, and would drop it off
later that day. Whenthatdidn’t happen, I sent an email to
her parents. The essay materialized the next day, along with apologies for the
delays from them and her. Minimally acceptable in terms of content and
structure, I decided that this was not a good time to tell her to do it again—I
inferred I’d already caused some tumult in her household, and establishing a
reputation as a remorseless academic stalker would not be the best way to
promote a working relationship. But clearly, I was going to have to keep an eye
on her.

Her
next essay, handed in on time, was even weaker. In my comments, I beat around
the bush a bit, commending her for her evident engagement and willingness to
grapple with the question, but finally confessed that I found it—hesitating to
use the word, but deciding it was best—“incoherent.” I asked her to come and
see me so that we could plot a course for revision. I felt both justified and
guilty for this approach. Justified, because I felt it important to both be
willing to help as well as ask her to take responsibility for her work, and
guilty because I was asking her to demonstrate a level of maturity she’d
already shown she lacked. I always feel a tug between trying to nudge my
students along and protecting my time, and at some level I knew that if I
wasn’t more proactive with Ginger, she’d slip my mind. As indeed she did.

It
was her parents who pushed the process along, sending around group emails to
her teachers asking for feedback about her work a couple weeks later. A flurry
of email exchanges with her advisor followed, which culminated in a phone call
from the school learning specialist telling me that she happened to be with
Ginger as we spoke and wondering if she could send her my way. Yes, I said,
turning back to my work with the added fervor of knowing it was going to be
interrupted momentarily.

Now she’s here at my desk, backpack at her
feet, awaiting her fate. Dark hair, dark eyes, she’s pretty, maybe even
striking, but her sense of vulnerability is so palpable that it overrides any
other attribute. I try to set her at her ease. Where do you live, Ginger
(uptown), what do you your folks do (they’re both on the business side of the
television industry), do you have any siblings (an older half-sister from her
father's previous marriage). Her answers are direct, earnest, and dead ends.
This is not a conversation.

“What do you do for fun, Ginger?”

“I dunno,” she replies. “Nothing, really.”
Then, brightly, as if she’s suddenly realized the solution to an algebra
problem that’s been posed to her: “I decided this week to work on sets for the
spring musical!”

“That’s great,” I say, wishing I could
make that ember flare. But I don’t have the presence of mind to ask her what
she’s making, how the show is going, or something to keep the momentum going.
The only thought that comes to mind is that she'll have one more reason to put
off grappling with her academic difficulties. And I think, not for the first
time, that I have a worse track record with girls than boys when it comes to
dealing with struggling students.

We proceed to talk about her course work.
Usually math and science are harder than history and English, but this year it
seems to be the other way around. Last semester’s history teacher was
different, she tells me. More facts and dates and smaller, more manageable,
assignments. From another kid, this would be barely veiled criticism. I don’t
think she means it that way, though perhaps she should. But we need to get down
to the business at hand.

“So what did you understand my message to
you to be in my comments?” I ask. This is a standard gambit of mine; it’s
helpful for students to interpret what I said in their own words, and for me to
be prompted, dozens of essays and days later, about what I said to one kid in
particular.

“That I was incoherent,” she replies. Ugh.
She got that message, all right.

I prompt her to tell me what she was
thinking about when she was writing the essay, and once she gets launched on a
little soliloquy, things get easier. I jot down some notes as she talks,
structuring her various points into a simple outline. The essay she’s narrating
is rudimentary, and doesn’t quite answer the question I ask. But if she can
actually execute what she’s saying on paper, we’ll be making a discrete step
forward.

I show her the outline. “Does this make
sense to you?”

She looks at it intently. “Yes,” she says.
“I had a pretty clear idea when I sat down, but I felt like I had so many ideas
in my head, and I have attention deficit issues, and I dunno . . . .” her voice
trails off. I don’t think she wanted to surrender the fact of a learning
disability to me. But this is apparently what she’s supposed to do, and she’s
going to play her part.

“I sort of understand,” I tell her. “I
have a kid with learning disabilities. I won’t tell you I know what that’s
like, but I think I have some notion of the issues.” She looks me in the eye
for the first time. She understands my gesture for what it is, and her
acknowledgment feels like one in its own right.

My problem now is that I don’t know where
to go with this. I know it’s very easy to say the wrong thing—promise too much,
offer too little. Our silence is awkward. Ginger pulls together the two sides
of the unzipped hoodie she’s wearing over her scoop-necked shirt, something
she’ll do repeatedly in the remainder of our meeting. This saddens me.

Back to the task at hand. She’s going to
work off this blueprint. She asks when I want the revised version. I ask when’s
good for her. She tells me to tell her. How’s Friday. All right, then. We agree
to meet again before an upcoming test. “This is going to work out fine,” I tell
her. “I know it’s hard—it’s hard for everyone, no one writes effortlessly—but
it’s going to be fine.” She smiles at me, hopefully and doubtfully, as she
returns her papers to her backpack and zips it up. Our meeting is over.

Mom will follow up with an email; I
promise to read multiple drafts. But it's been a few weeks now, and nothing has
happened. Ginger avoids eye contact again whenever possible. Maybe she'll pull
things together on my watch, or someone else's. She has the good fortune—if at
times she surely regards it as a mixed blessing—of people looking after her.
But for me the whole encounter is a reminder of the limited ability of teachers
generally, and this teacher in particular, to fill the unaccountable holes that
riddle our lives.

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen